SUO: RE: Comment #5 ''Characterizing Axioms"
This message from Bill Burkett WBurkett@pdit.com bounced, so here it is
again:
Nicola's suggestion echoes what Michael Jackson calls "designations".
(Jackson, M., Software Requirements & Specifications : A Lexicon of
Practice, Principles and Prejudices. Acm Press Books, 1995. ISBN
0201877120.)
A designation is like a definition, but it's purpose is to unambiguously
pick-out a particular phenomena in the domain of interest. It consists of
the designated terms and a set of recognition rules by which "one of these
things" can be recognized. Designations are then used in the construction
of definitions of other terms. He further recommends that the set of
designations be small to serve as a "narrow bridge" between the (real world)
domain and the descriptive model of that domain.
In other words, I think Nicola's suggestion is a good one. The open
question is how big the "bridge" should be.
Bill Burkett
-----Original Message-----
From: Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I
[mailto:James.Schoening@mail1.monmouth.army.mil]
Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 12:18
To: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
Subject: SUO: Comment #5 ''Characterizing Axioms"
SUO,
Let's now discuss the comment from Nicola Guarino
[Nicola.Guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it].
I believe the specific suggestion is to change "...roughly ten
definitional statements..." to "...some characterizing axioms...".
This comment relates to #4 "Structural Axioms."
Jim Schoening
================================================
Nicola Guarino voted YES, with this being one of the comments:
>Scope of Proposed Project:
>(The Scope describes what is being done, including the technical boundaries
>of the project.)
>This standard will specify the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose
>upper level ontology. An ontology is a set of terms and formal definitions.
>This will be limited to the upper level, which provides definition for
>general-purpose terms and provides a structure for compliant lower level
>domain ontologies. It is estimated to contain between 1000 and 2500 terms
>plus roughly ten definitional statements for each term.
...plus some characterizing axioms for each term [in general, they
will not be "definitional"]
====End of Comment ===========================================
The original Scope and Purpose is as follows:
Scope of Proposed Project:
(The Scope describes what is being done, including the technical boundaries
of the project.)
This standard will specify the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose
upper level ontology. An ontology is a set of terms and formal definitions.
This will be limited to the upper level, which provides definition for
general-purpose terms and provides a structure for compliant lower level
domain ontologies. It is estimated to contain between 1000 and 2500 terms
plus roughly ten definitional statements for each term. It is intended to
provide the foundation for ontologies of much larger size and more specific
scope.
Purpose of Proposed Project:
(The Purpose describes why the standard needs to be developed and who will
benefit.)
* The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference to
support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
* This standard will enable the development of a large (20,000+)
general-purpose standard ontology of common concepts to be developed, which
will provide the basis for middle-level domain ontologies and lower-level
application ontologies.
* The ontology will be suitable for "compilation" to more restricted
forms such as XML or database schema. This will enable database developers
to define new data elements in terms of a common ontology, and thereby gain
some degree of interoperability with other compliant systems.
* Owners of existing systems will be able to map existing data
elements just once to a common ontology, and thereby gain a degree of
interoperability with other representations that are compliant with the SUO.
* Domain-specific ontologies which are compliant with the SUO will be
able to interoperate (to some degree) by virtue of the shared common terms
and definitions.
* Applications of the ontology will include:
* E-commerce applications from different domains which need to
interoperate at both the data and semantic levels.
* Educational applications in which students learn concepts and
relationships directly from, or expressed in terms of, a common ontology.
This will also enable a standard record of learning to be kept.
* Natural language understanding tasks in which a knowledge based
reasoning system uses the ontology to disambiguate among likely
interpretations of natural language statements.
===============